Taking Apart Shelves

It is funny how things never quite go according to (our) plan on the farm. It’s also funny how one thing leads to another. For instance, we got to the farm on Tuesday with a list of tasks to get done. One of them, the smallest and easiest, was to come back with four 1/2 inch pine boards cut to 4 1/2 feet long. We need them to lengthen out our seed starting shelf, because we got new grow lights. The grow lights are 4 feet long, with cords attached to both ends, so they don’t fit well in our current shelf.

Because this was the quickest and easiest job, I decided to tackle it first. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any boards long enough ready to hand, so I had to take them off some old bookshelves we inherited when we bought the place. These have been stacked in the carport waiting for a day when we had time to dismantle them, but it just hasn’t been a priority.

So I grabbed a shelf and brought it to the shop and got out my drill and started taking off the long boards.

Winnie came over to help.

She likes taking the screws I take out and putting them in the screw bucket.

This is a good job for a Winnie, but she was not finished when that job was finished.

She got her little hammer (it used to be Seppi’s little hammer, but he is big now) and started tapping out the nails.

This, apparently looked like so much fun that Seppi and Ellie grabbed some crowbars and ran over to help. Unfortunately, there weren’t enough nails left, and I didn’t have enough boards, so I had to go get another shelf.

This was the most fun they had had all day.

Then Ellie wanted to use the drill.

So she took this long board off by herself. Because this took so long, and Seppi still wanted to take apart more boards, we grabbed another shelf.

This one was put together with brads (have I mentioned I hate brads?!) so this was a much longer dismantling. We had to finish it after lunch.

Seppi was not strong enough to pull the brads, but he pulled the shelf labels with his new pliers that he got for Christmas.

So much concentration. To paraphrase Joel Salatin, A boy that can hammer nails straight when he is ten was allowed to hammer them crooked when he was five.

Ellie still wasn’t done yet, so I grabbed the last shelf. Lots’ of crowbar work here for her.

And then she got to pull out the drill and take almost all the screws out.

You never can tell what task the kids are going to latch on to. When they do latch on to something, it’s a good idea just to keep going with it as long as they are into it, and time allows.

Even, sometimes, if it means you don’t get to other things.

And we did get our boards, after all.